' 



62 The Botanical Renaissance [ch. 



extraordinary beauty (Text-figs. 30, 31, 32, 58, 70, 86, 87, 

 88). Some of them gain a special interest as being the 

 first European figures of certain American plants, e.g. 

 Indian Corn {Zea mats L.) and the Great Pumpkin 

 (Cucurbita maxima Duch.) (Text-fig. 32). These wood- 

 cuts became familiar in England in the second half of the 

 sixteenth century, being used on a reduced scale (borrowed 

 from the octavo edition) in both William Turner's herbal 

 and Lyte's Dodoens, two books which we shall consider 

 a little later. In Fuchs' great work we are fortunate in 

 possessing, in addition to the botanical drawings, a full- 

 length portrait of the author himself, holding a spray of 

 Veronica, on the verso of the title-page (see Frontispiece), 

 and, at the end of the work, named portraits, which are 

 generally supposed to represent the artist who drew the 

 plants from nature, the draughtsman whose business it was 

 to copy the outline on to the wood, and the engraver who 

 actually cut the block (Text-fig. 89). It has also been 

 suggested that the first of these is perhaps engaged in 

 colouring a printed sheet. These portraits are powerfully 

 drawn, and remarkably convincing. It is pleasant to think 

 that we know not merely the names, but the very features 

 of the men who collaborated to give us what is perhaps 

 the most beautiful herbal ever produced. 



The influence of Fuchs* illustrations is more strongly 

 felt in later work than that of his text. The majority of 

 the wood engravings in Bock's ' Kreuter Biich' (1546), 

 Dodoens' 'Cruydeboeck' (1554), Turner's 'New Herball' 

 (1551 — 1568), Lyte's ■ Niewe Herball' (1578) and Jean 

 Bauhin's 'Historia plantarum universalis' (1651), are copied 

 from Fuchs, or even printed from his actual wood-blocks, 

 while a number of his figures reappear in the herbals of 

 Egenolph, d'Alechamps, Tabernaemontanus, etc., and the 

 commentaries of Ruellius and Amatus Lusitanus on Dios- 

 corides. 



Fuchs arranged his work alphabetically, making no 

 attempt at a natural grouping of the plants, and his herbal 

 is therefore without importance in the history of plant 

 classification. His influence on methods of plant descrip- 

 tion was, however, considerable, as is shown by the fact 

 that Dodoens, in his ' Cruydeboeck,' took Fuchs' herbal 



